The Braintree acquisition by PayPal is now benefiting consumers

Last month, Startup Daily commented that global payments company Braintree, which has experienced enormous success in the country, had some serious competition now with the arrival of Stripe – particularly when it comes to winning over the startup community.

However, the introduction of the new v.zero SDK by Braintree, which rolled out across Australia yesterday is definitely going to cause startups to think hard about their choice of payment portal, mainly due to the fact that this new service will allow people to integrate Paypal and Braintree simultaneously into their website or application.

With the Braintree v.zero SDK, a customer can now accept payments through PayPal without needing to do a separate integration on their platform.

This is great, as it gives a startup access to the 5.5 million Australian Paypal customers and 148 million active customers worldwide. The beauty for developers is that it is all achieved in just a ten lines of code. Customers of the startup will then also be able to store their PayPal credentials for easy pre-approved future payments – without leaving the site or app.

Australia is one of the first markets outside of the US to have access to this. The US got the technology a couple of months ago; and Australia is in the same rollout as Canada, France, Germany, Sweden and the UK, showing that Braintree is taking the Asia Pacific region seriously. Already there are now seven full-time staff based in Australia, and Tyson Hackwood has moved from being the country manager to Head of Asia and is based out of Singapore.

Regarding where he sees the new technologies that the two companies will deliver to customers, Hackwood says, “Mobile really is the future, and we want to enable developers to create magical buying experiences. Between PayPal and Braintree, we offer a comprehensive range of products, services, scale, innovation and appeal to the entire ecosystem: merchants, developers and consumers.”

Some of the most globally recognised Australian startup companies are users of the Braintree platform including 99Designs, the ABC, Envato, Aston Club, Vinus, Bike Exchange, Belroy, Agworld, KidsDeals, Microlancer, Oomph and WORKetc. The Exchange Group that owns Bike Exchange have also been a beta tester for the pilot program of the v.zero SDK.